Matt Taylor

Matt Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer whose political reporting has appeared in Slate, Salon, The Atlantic, The New Republic, NYMag.com, Capital New York, and VICE, among other publications. You can follow him on Twitter @matthewt_ny

Recent Articles

AP Photo/Seth Wenig I f it’s still rather unclear how Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio intends to govern New York City, his selection of William J. Bratton as police commissioner on Thursday offered precious little in the way of clarifying clues. The former top cop in Boston and Los Angeles, Bratton served as New York Police Department commissioner at the beginning of Rudy Giuliani's administration in the mid 1990s, where his success is credited with popularizing neighborhood-mapping programs like Compstat and the "Broken Windows" theory of crime, which essentially holds that pursuing petty acts of vandalism and maintaining urban environments can prevent more serious crime. What his admirers tend not to mention is that Bratton also ramped up the use of stop and frisk in Los Angeles, and that tactic represents the steepest cost imposed on the poor in the name of Michael Bloomberg's Luxury City—as well as a preferred campaign trail punching bag of de Blasio. But if the Bratton appointment is...

Jenny Warburg W hen he wins New York City's mayoral election today, Bill de Blasio will have succeeded in branding himself the next big thing in progressive politics. But it remains to be seen which de Blasio shines through over the next four years: the former Hillary Clinton operative who admires neoliberal Governor Andrew Cuomo and is friendly with the real-estate industry, or the activist lefty who got arrested protesting the closure of a Brooklyn hospital and has promised to take on income inequality and the New York Police Department's sprawling anti-terrorism apparatus. "The aspiration is to be fundamentally transformative," says Professor John Mollenkopf at The City University of New York's Center for Urban Research. "He really does want to see how New York City can become less unequal and more capable of promoting upward mobility. But assuming things go the way the polls suggest, he still faces an enormous challenge." In particular, de Blasio will have to muscle through an...

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer "O ur mission is to change our city in the name of progress,” Bill de Blasio said to the crowd assembled in a Gowanus, Brooklyn bar after midnight on Tuesday, claiming victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary with just over 40 percent of the vote. New York's Public Advocate and progressive populist appeared to have pulled it off, stunning not just his opponents but also many of the city’s political professionals and financial elites. He had forged an Obama-esque coalition in the Big Apple. Indeed, the atmosphere at the event felt eerily familiar if you followed the 44 th president’s 2008 campaign. “We understand that making big change is never easy,” de Blasio said. “It never has been. And there are those who have said our ambition for this city is too bold, and that we’re asking of the wealthiest New Yorkers too much. That we’re setting our sights for the children of this city too high. That we’re guilty, guilty my friends, of thinking too big. Let...

AP Photo/Mary Altaffer B ill de Blasio is under attack in New York City’s mayoral race, and not just because his broad, towering frame makes for an easy target, that gray, conservatively-manicured block of hair rising above voters and the press at every campaign stop. A self-styled movement progressive with a biracial family from Park Slope, Brooklyn, de Blasio has seized the mantle of change in a city where many residents appear to crave it after a decade under billionaire incumbent Michael Bloomberg’s cold vision of financial capitalist technocracy. With just a few days left before the September 10 Democratic primary, de Blasio is way out in front of his rivals; in the latest Quinnipiac poll , he crossed the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a run-off and advance directly to the November general election. Now de Blasio finds himself on the cusp of tremendous power over a city at a crossroads, facing existential questions over everything from expired municipal employees' union...